By Tim Binnall
An Indonesian man on his way to get his car in a parking lot was left scratching his head when he noticed that a massive downpour had burst forth from the sky, but the torrential rain was falling on just one vehicle. According to a local media report, Uryan Riana stumbled upon the strange scene late last month as he was leaving a hotel in the city of Bekasi. While en route to his car, the man stopped in his tracks when he saw "a strange and extraordinary phenomenon" wherein a solitary black car was being pounded by heavy rain while the rest of the parking lot was eerily serene.
Initially thinking that someone with a hose was simply spraying the car, Riana looked around, saw no such person, and soon realized that the water was, in fact, rain. Perhaps thinking that he was witnessing some supernatural incident, as one is prone to do in this day and age, the witness promptly pulled out his cell phone and filmed the bizarre sight. Unsurprisingly, his footage of the wondrous moment in the hotel parking lot quickly went viral on Indonesian social media with many people left wondering how such a thing could happen.
While it is suspected that the surprising event is a rare case of a weather phenomenon known as 'ultra localized rain,' not everyone is convinced that the video shows such a natural event. An official with the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency expressed skepticism over that conclusion, describing it as "very unlikely." Miming Saepudin explained that clouds known to produce ultra localized rain are generally considerably bigger than those seen in the video and that the meteorological conditions at the time of the event appear to preclude the phenomenon from occurring. As such, unfortunately, the possibility that the footage was a well-crafted hoax cannot be discounted.